[lit-ideas] Notes from Trapani
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2004 18:35:37 EDT
S. Cameron writes:
>>Unfortunately (think of the movie "Dumb and Dumber") somehow it became
>>fashionable to be unintelligent (even more than the previous
>>anti-intellectual sentiment -- probably based on envy). Many are
>>intimidated by those who think -- and those who speak thoughtfully. My
>>students shy away from those who are "braniacs" geeks, nerds, or
>>"eggheads". However, it is a fact.
J. Evans comments:
>Yes. (It isn't so bad here.)
---
I was reading The Notebooks of Samuel Butler on this yesterday -- my current
bedside book:
On something like this?
"Reading and learning are things that anyone can do of his [sic] own free
will, but not so _thinking_. Thinking must be kindled, lke a fire by a draught;
it must be sustanined by some interest in the matter in hand."
('Introduction').
Perhaps not too brilliant, but good.
My favourite notes by Butler so far include:
"Morality turns on whether the pleasure precedes or follows the pain. Thus,
it is immoral to get drunk because the headache comes after the drinking, but
if the headache comes first, and the drunkenness afterwards, it would be
moral to get drunk." (p. 29).
The other one is a bit less Hegelian and more Victorian:
"A little boy and a little girl were looking at a picture of Adam and Even.
'Which is Adam, and which is Eve?' said one. 'I do not know,' said the other,
'but I could tell if they had their clothes on."
--- This edition comes with a bio of the man. Author of Erewhon (Nowhere
written backwards). The bio reads, for the year 1897,
"Death of Charles Paine Pauli."
--- one of his friends. Butler spent a lot of time in Sicily, trying to
prove: that the Odyssey was written by a woman, and set in what's modern
Trapani
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